A beautiful young woman from long ago in the monitor, and they didn’t know her name or what she was doing in there.
It did strangely resemble Yuko.
“Kawabata and Nakamura thought this chick was their god or something. But to Yabe, this is actually what she thought she looked like. This is what I look like, she thought when she drew it. It does look like her drawing, right? The eyes and nose are the same.”
I see, the whole thing is based on a pattern. It is reduced and adapted the same exact way.
Only the color of the pupils was different.
“If you look carefully, you’ll see Yuko’s father also wrote messages here. Nothing extreme like that other guy, but just how he was really into this stuff as a kid, and how he’s still into it. Typical fan mail. Yuko had probably looked at stuff like this since she was really little. Maybe not shown it per se, but she had definitely seen it. Someone with her kind of perception disorder might be affected by early exposure.
“They wouldn’t forgive her,” Mio said in a loud exhale and snapped off the power on the monitor farthest from her.
“But…aren’t there tons of people who do these kinds of illustrations?”
“You saying it should be okay to copy?”
“Copies are okay. There are originals, and someone makes a copy. The copy could never be as good as the original. Except in Yuko’s case. To her, the world really looked like this. She lived in a world made of deformée images. These fanatics couldn’t forgive her. They had to confirm that she really had this defect, and when they did, they promptly eradicated her.”
Eradicated.
“That’s their reason? Because she sees the world like it’s illustrated?”
Should people be killing each other?
“The first girl who was killed…” Mio continued. “The first victim won the grand prize at the Deformée Character Biennale. The DC Biennale is where everyone exhibits their original DCs. The character that wins the prize is obviously praised as an original, but her work apparently looked a lot like something that appeared briefly in these guys’ moving image work. None of the judges noticed. It created a big stir but eventually they dropped it. It was just similar looking, and no one really thought it was a direct copy. But these fans wouldn’t forgive it.”
“Blasphemy again?”
“Yeah, you know, ‘the idiots who pass off your original work as their own have to be eradicated.’ That’s what they did.”
She had a point.
“But that’s not all.”
Mio drew up another image on the monitor next to the one she’d just turned off.
“You know this? It’s been popular lately. Deformation Idols. I prefer the old monsters and stuff, but…”
Even Hazuki had seen this character before.
It was the star of an explosively popular fiction series from last year.
The series was about a girl from no country in particular, from no era in particular, going on some kind of adventure.
Hazuki remembered downloading a few episodes because there were so many rave reviews.
But she’d never actually watched them all the way through.
The story was mediocre and it unfolded too suddenly; there were too many unexposed elements and subplots for Hazuki to follow. Eventually the show got to be boring for her.
Earlier this year, people had begun broadcasting their own daily lives twenty-four hours a day by connecting onto a special network.
It wasn’t as though something were happening all the time—mostly it was just people asleep—but that meant you had a different episode every single day for a year. You’d wonder who on earth would want to watch something like that, but daily life shows were apparently really popular, especially among the middle-aged to older viewers.
“Doesn’t this look like her?”
“What do you mean? This older DC character?”
“The one that looks like her and this other illustration. Look alike, right? The face and the hairdo?” Mio asked.
“Ahh”
Now that she mentioned it.
“The creator of course acknowledges being influenced by old DC artists. However there were some extreme fans who wouldn’t let it slide. They said this was the original, and what do you call that moving illustration thing again? A…”
“Anime?” Hazuki suggested.
“Yes! Anime. What’s anime a redaction of, I wonder. What language is it? Anyway, it was an original work having nothing to do with that ancient anime. People agreed it bore a resemblance, but you know, they were a little defensive. There are lots of fan sites for this show. So here’s this hotshot on one of the biggest fan sites for the show defending it, and she became famous for actually speaking out about it a lot. Well, she was killed too.”
“Really?”
“That girl from the neighboring section. The second victim. Also, you know those people who dress up like their favorite characters? There was that one girl who was famous for wearing identical clothes to and doing her hair exactly like these DC characters. She was the fourth victim. She was on the daily life channel and garnered her own fans. The crazies probably didn’t appreciate that.”
“Didn’t appreciate…”
“Kawabata and Nakamura didn’t appreciate it,” Mio said impatiently, then turned off that monitor. “That was probably blasphemous to them too.”
“You’re saying Kawabata and Nakamura are responsible for all these other murders too?” Ayumi said. She looked at the palms of her hands, then brought her nails up to her nose. “Serial murderers, huh?”
“Vicious murders.” Mio stood up from her chair.
“No mistaking it. Right?”
“They were definitely the killers!” Mio yelled. “No doubt about it! But then if they were, then…”
“Wait a second.” Ayumi lifted her face. “There are others.”
“Others?”
“Aikawa was killed too. And there were others killed before her.”
“Yabe makes it seven. Those guys had motives to kill four of them.
The remaining three…suppose they all had this extrasensory defect. Aikawa from our district? Aikawa could have. It’s hard to find out, right?”
“It’s speculation.”
“Still.”
“Still nothing. Besides, at the very least, Nakamura and Kawabata couldn’t have killed Yabe. Yabe was also killed by someone else,” Ayumi said.
“Like I said, I don’t know what that means!” Mio pounded her desk with force.
“These crimes had to have been committed by them. The other murder victims don’t have anything in common with them. Even though…”
“Everyone except Yabe.”
“So?”
“Wait.” Hazuki waved her hand through the air. “Yabe was definitely targeted by Nakamura and definitely attacked by him. That’s a fact, but she was killed by someone else. Then isn’t it possible that in the other cases too, a different person killed them than the one who taunted them?
Aren’t there, like, a lot of these animation fanatics?”
“You saying they have more partners?”
Hmmm, Mio said and withdrew, dropping her body back in the chair.
“Kawabata and Nakamura failed at their assignment, so they were— what’s that word again? Era…”
“Eradicate.”
“They were eradicated.”
“I don’t know about that,” Ayumi said with her hands cupping her mouth and nose. “You have a better explanation?” Mio said.
“No…” Ayumi said softly.
“According to what Mio said, there are old animation fans all around the world.”
“See, I told you!”
“So then let’s say there are many others like Nakamura and Kawabata who are fanatics about this stuff. If there are, it’s possible they’re placed all over the world, right?” Ayumi said.
“I guess,” Mio said.
“Perversion doesn’t have borders. So. If the
y are all over the world they could form a unit.”
“An organization that would eradicate from the world all those who blaspheme ancient animated illustrations? Huh?”
“I’m sure there are serial murders taking place all over the world at this moment, but I think this is the only part of the world where the murders are motivated by anime. You think that means the homicidal anime fans all live in this region? Or you think this area is full of the kind of people that would want to start a murdering club?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Hazuki said.
“Then why are all the murders taking place only here?” Ayumi asked.
“Are you saying there’s another motive?” Mio said.
“No.” Ayumi looked suspiciously at all the machines in the room, then glanced at Hazuki and faced Mio. “There are other murderers,” she said.
“Other…”
“Those two aren’t the only killers.”
“You think there are others with motives to kill?”
“Motive doesn’t matter, really,” Ayumi said expressionlessly. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” Mio responded. “It can’t not matter.”
“Well it doesn’t. No matter how sophisticated the reason, a murder is a murder, and similarly, it doesn’t matter how great the motive is, if you can’t kill, you won’t. But someone who can kill definitely will.”
“That may be, but…”
“There are killers nearby.”
“Nearby?” Mio spun around and did a once-over on her room and said, “No. There are not.” Then, “What are you talking about? Or wait…are you suggesting that that Rey Mao bitch is the other killer?”
Ayumi didn’t say anything.
“What is it? Did you see something? Did Mao kill Kawabata?”
“No, not that. I’ve told you already, she took a punch and got knocked out. I’m saying—”
“What is it? What are you trying to say?” Mio pressed Ayumi.
“Just that we shouldn’t single out Nakamura and Kawabata.”
“But we should. They killed people.”
“You don’t have to be special to kill people.”
“That may be, but these guys are. I don’t know if it was for anime or animism, but…What do they take humans for?” Mio kicked the steel legs on her chair. “What kind of monster values invented characters over real human beings? Even when people used to kill cows and pigs, they knew not to kill each other. People have been picketed and even punished for catching fish and killing sharks! These guys killed humans! Are humans less important than sharks? Less important than these damned illustrations?”
“Humans aren’t more or less important.” Ayumi looked straight at Mio. Mio widened her eyes.
“What did you say?”
“We’re not bigger or smaller or even better or worse. Humans and fish are the same,” she said, and took a deep breath.
“Neither of them has special value,” she said finally.
“No value?” Mio walked over the cables on the floor and raised a fist to Ayumi.
“Are you saying Yuko’s life had no value?”
Ayumi lifted her face. “No. I’m saying that to crush a bug or to murder a human is all the same. You take life. If we can’t kill people, we shouldn’t be allowed to kill bugs. That’s why today we no longer eat murdered animals.”
“Yeah, but…”
“I’m not saying Yabe’s life had no value. Just that hers wasn’t any more special than another’s. There’s no such thing as a life that’s too big or too small. Our lives are perfectly suited for the bodies we inhabit.
And none of us has a more special life than the other.”
“And that makes it okay to murder people, Kono?”
“I never said that.” I never said that, she repeated, and clenched her thin white fingers into fists of her own. “It’s probably not okay to kill.”
“Of course it’s not! It’s a serious crime. I mean, this is a drawing. It’s not a fish or a turtle. It’s a fucking drawing. They’re suggesting the drawing is more valuable than a human life. I can’t understand that. And this drawing…it has no value whatsoever.”
Click. Mio turned off another monitor.
A snapping sound reverberated through the walls and ceiling as she powered down the last monitor.
“Those guys didn’t care one way or the other about human life, right?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then what was it?”
“Nakamura and Kawabata didn’t view human life lightly. The animation that these guys cherished—I’ve watched some of it too—and the message was always that human life is incredibly valuable, that the human life force is weightier than the earth. The plot was always some humanistic mumbo jumbo. So there’s no way they viewed human life lightly. I just think they didn’t realize a human’s life was as sacred as a fish’s life. In fact they thought human life was infinitely more important than that of any other animal. However, they killed one person, and nothing happened. Then they knew even less the value of life.”
“How so?”
“They got away with killing one human, and nothing in the world changed,” Ayumi said. “It’s different from the world in the monitor.”
Yes. This was something even Hazuki understood.
If truth lay only in the monitor, then what lay outside it was all false. In that case not even murdering a human would be real. You murder, get caught, go to court, get sentenced to jail. Thus was born the murder case. Until all that happened a killing was just a fantasy.
But…
Ayumi glanced at Hazuki and said, “This is different from what you think, Makino. Killing people is real. Like eating food.”
“Eating.”
“Sure.” Ayumi looked at her palms again. “No matter how immersed we get in our world of numbers, no matter how deep we escape into our monitors, we still have to eat. Even if it isn’t life that we’re eating, we take something, put it in our mouths, chew, digest, and defecate. That is all real.”
“Okay, and…?”
“You can say you ate but still be hungry. That’s because we’re living beings. So that’s real too. Similarly, they can record your death, but as long as you’re alive, you are still living. The records can say you were born, but until you come out of the womb you are not human. Your Cat friend doesn’t exist according to the government, but clearly she’s no ghost. I’ve seen her with my eyes and even talked to her. She exists. Makino is supposedly at home, but she’s not. She’s right here.”
Right.
According to the record, Hazuki was not here.
But right now, Hazuki was right here.
“Right?” Ayumi said to Mio. “Am I looking at the ghost of Makino? A false Makino?”
Possibly false, Hazuki thought. But.
I’m right here.
“You see, humans are made of these squiggly innards that they stuff with food and turn to mud, which they then excrete and regenerate. They are born bloody and die bloodless. That can’t be digitized. So killing humans is real.”
“But…”
Then why…Hazuki thought.
“Reality is much more of this nothing than we think. Nakamura and Kawabata didn’t understand that.”
“Nothing. It’s all nothing,” Ayumi said. “If a player does something wrong in a game, he or she may lose and even risks being ejected from the game world. Game over. In real life there is no game over. The world doesn’t end. Even if you kill someone, even if you do something you’re absolutely not supposed to do, it’s not like you won’t be able to use your server anymore or that information will no longer be transmitted. The world will not end if you kill someone. Yabe was killed, Kawabata was killed, and tomorrow still came. So…
“They were confused,” Ayumi finished.
“Confused, eh? If they were killed for being confused then I can’t stand for it,” Mio said quietly.
Ayumi passed a look straight through Mio’s profile.
&
nbsp; It was incredibly natural.
“Tsuzuki…you’re a regular do-gooder.”
“Don’t tease. Whether anyone dies or gets killed is not my business. It’s someone else’s problem. But I’m just frustrated. I’m pissed off because I don’t know what’s going on. What is going on? I wanted to observe everything taking place in the world. That’s why I built these special monitors. But some guy I don’t know has squirreled his way around the system and killed Yabe. I don’t get it.”
“You’re amazingly straightforward, Tsuzuki.” Ayumi sighed and walked toward the door that wouldn’t open.
“Are you expecting someone?”
“No. Why?”
“Nothing…”
BAM! From the hallway. Like someone had kicked at one of the doors leading to Mio’s room.
Then the door in the middle and finally the door that could open, did.
“Mao…”
With straight long hair and her Chinese clothing, Rey Mao stood there. Rey Mao stood silently, then entered the room with a serious air and grabbed Mio by the collar and pulled her up from her seat.
“What the hell what the hell?!” Mio tried to scramble away.
“What the fuck did you do?”
“What the…Were you injured?”
“Shut up!” Rey Mao barked. Mao’s clothing was torn and dirtied. There was blood on her face. The black clump by the side of her mouth also looked to be dried blood.
“What kind of arrangement was that?”
“It wasn’t an a-arrangement! Cat, you’re choking me.”
“Don’t you dare call me that!” Rey Mao dropped Mio.
Mio fell hard onto the chair and then onto the floor.
“I knew it. You killed them. You’re here to kill us now too.”
“Me, the killer? Then it was you who sold me out. For a second there I…”
Rey Mao went quiet and shook her shoulders.
“What do you mean for a second? What do you mean sold you out?”
“Stop fucking with me.”
Rey Mao raised her arm.
Mio craned her neck.
“We don’t like it when we’re betrayed. We hate it more than anything.”
Hazuki had been curled up, and now she was being pushed back to the corner. Ayumi proceeded forward and took Rey Mao by the arm.
“That’s enough. If you hurt her…Your strength is a deadly weapon.”
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